Suchergebnisse

International investment agreements (IIAs) emerged in the 1960's as an instrument to lower political risk for foreign investors and to facilitate political risk insurance when investing in developing countries with weak governance structures. Political risk is constituted by interferences to the investment by host states once the investor has entered the market and which would render the execution of the investment unduly burdensome, deprive the investor of the control or enjoyment of the investment or discriminate or treat the foreign investor arbitrarily. The legal provisions in IIAs include non–discrimination provisions, fair and equitable treatment, full protection and security, rights to compensation in case of expropriations, including indirect regulatory ones with the effect of depriving the investor of the control and benefits of the investment, provisions on free transfer of capital and, occasionally, non–precluded measures clauses as well as stabilization clauses in which the host state promises not to change the regulatory environment affecting the investment.

AbstractThis paper aims to show that fairness in trade calls for relaxing existing WTO rules to include a greater liberalisation of labour migration. After having addressed several objections to global egalitarianism, it will argue, first, that the world's rich and the world's poor participate in a same multilateral trading system whose point is primarily to reduce trade barriers, and hence to establish global economic competitions, in order to raise their standards of living; second, that these competitions are subject to requirements of formal and substantive fairness; and, third, that the substantive fairness of the competitions that are taking place in the field of trade in goods is likely to require a greater liberalisation of labour migration, especially low-skilled labour from developing countries.

The section on WTO law highlights the interface between international trade law and national risk regulation. It is meant to cover cases and other legal developments regarding the SPS, TBT and TRIPS Agreements and the general exceptions in both GATT 1994 and GATS as well as to inform about pertinent developments in recognized international standardization bodies and international law. Of recurrent interest in this area are questions of whether precautionary policies can be justified under WTO law, the standard of review with which panels and the Appellate Body assess scientific evidence and the extent to which policy can and should influence risk regulation.

Under Section II of the Rules of Conduct for the DSU, the institutional affiliation of experts may be considered as an element that casts doubts on their impartiality and independence. Under Articles 5.1 and 5.7 of the SPS Agreement, the level of protection that a particular country is ready to tolerate may inform risk assessment and have an impact on the determination of insufficiency of scientific evidence. In a situation in which there is sufficient scientific evidence for performance of risk assessment in one of the international standard setting-organizations, one may still find insufficiency as provided by Article 5.7 if new data puts into question the relationship between the relevant scientific evidence and the conclusions in relation to risk, thereby not permitting the performance of a sufficiently objective assessment of risk (authors' headnote).